Stoke-on-Trent (city)

Stoke-on-Trent (city), city, west-central England, on the River Trent, to the south-west of the Peak District National Park. Although for geographical and ceremonial purposes it forms part of the county of Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent has been a self-governing unitary authority in its own right since the local government reorganization of 1998 (see Stoke-on-Trent (borough)). Population 240,643 (2001).

Stoke-on-Trent is traditionally the centre of the British ceramic industry, and is the largest clayware producer in the world. Steel is manufactured at Shelton steelworks, and other local industries include chemical works, rubber works and tyre manufacturing, engineering plants, paper mills, textile processing, and electronics.

The Potteries are particularly associated with the literary work of Arnold Bennett (born in Hanley, 1867), notably through his “Five Towns” novels; Bennett refused to acknowledge that Fenton, the sixth town of the Potteries, was a town at all. Other notable people associated with Stoke-on-Trent include Captain E. J. Smith, the captain of the Titanic, who went down with his ship; Reginald Mitchell, the designer of the World War II fighter plane, the Spitfire; and the footballer Sir Stanley Matthews, who began his career in the 1930s, playing for Stoke City. The site of an old colliery and other reclaimed land is being planted as the Central Forest Park. Stoke-on-Trent was the site of the first National Garden Festival in 1985; the site was subsequently developed into the Festival Park, a business area where some 3,000 jobs have been created. The Museums of the Potteries are located in Stoke-on-Trent.

The city’s history is intimately bound up with that of the ceramics industry; the Stoke-on-Trent area is, in fact, generally known as the Staffordshire Potteries, or just the Potteries. The production of pottery dates back to at least the 17th century, and was founded on the area’s abundant supplies of clay; of salt and lead for glazing; and of coal, used to fire the kilns. By the time Josiah Wedgwood set up business for himself in 1759, the area was supplying a wide variety of earthenware and stoneware produced in and around the villages of the area. Pottery production was also in the process of changing from a cottage-based to a factory-based industry, a transformation that placed the Potteries at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. In 1769, Wedgwood himself built one of Britain’s first large factories, in Etruria, the village he established on the outskirts of Burslem, his birthplace. His work, and that of other famous 18th-century Staffordshire potters, such as Joseph Spode I, Thomas Minton, the Wood family, and Thomas Whieldon, helped make the area synonymous with ceramics. This position was confirmed when, in around 1800, Spode’s son, Josiah Spode II, developed a fine bone china (porcelain containing bone ash) that was cheap to produce and eminently marketable. His success ensured the Potteries’ domination in subsequent porcelain production. The industry’s growth was also aided by the opening, in 1777, of the Grand Trunk Canal (now the Trent and Mersey Canal), which provided an outlet to the coast at Hull.

By the 19th century, the villages of the Potteries had grown into sizeable towns, of which Burslem was the largest. Calls for them to be amalgamated into one administrative unit began as early as 1817. Administrative rationalization began in 1857, when the towns of Hanley and Shelton were combined into the borough of Hanley. In 1865 Longton and Long End became the borough of Longton; and in 1874 the towns of Stoke, Penkhull, and Boothen were brought together as the borough of Stoke-upon-Trent (generally known as Stoke). Two other towns, Fenton and Tunstall, gained urban district status in the 1890s. In 1910 the rationalization process was completed when Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Stoke, Fenton, and Tunstall were brought together to form the county borough of Stoke-on-Trent, the largest such amalgamation ever to occur in Britain. In 1925, Stoke-on-Trent gained city status. The 1953 Clean Air Act significantly improved working conditions of about 70,000 people employed in the pottery industry. By the late 1990s, though, the numbers of workers had fallen to just over 20,000. After the local government reorganization of 1998, the Stoke-on-Trent unitary authority received its first directly elected mayor in 2002.